Kafka in Love (19 page)

She is lugging a trunk with her, in which she has packed the linens and clothes that her brother asked her for, a long list! He left Prague thinking he would be gone only a few days and didn’t bring his winter clothes. She unpacks three unstarched shirts, three pairs of ordinary socks and one warm pair, his black suit, his big overcoat, his old blue raglan coat, two pairs of long underwear, a lightweight sheet, a pillowcase, a bath towel, an ordinary pair of gloves, two nightshirts, his dressing gown, his foot muff, his fingerless gloves, and a cap. Also three coat hangers. Ottla has added letter paper, pens, journals, and a bar of soap. She gives Dora some dishcloths and an
embroidered linen tablecloth. Oddly, Dora almost breaks into tears. In the hard city of Berlin, this linen is a luxury she has almost forgotten.

As his sister is leaving, Franz slips a doll into her luggage for Vera. In case Lolotte should decide to go off on a trip, you never know with dolls!

He mentions Ottla’s visit to Max, saying, Everything she saw at our house appealed to her. He is mistaken. On reaching home, Ottla informs Franz that she is sending him a fifteen-kilo package and she has asked her mother to do the same.

“Fifteen kilos,” says Franz. “That seems too much, fifteen kilos, what can possibly be in it? I don’t want to live at your expense.”

M
ax arrives shortly after, curious to meet the mysterious Fräulein Diamant whom his friend has refused to say anything about. He is enormously impressed by her love for Franz. The two live in wonderful harmony, he feels. Kafka has never seemed so confident.

Dr. Ernst Weiss, who is as active and as nervous as ever (it is the nervousness of a lively but embittered man), comes to visit them. He wants to thank Franz in person. When the publisher Carl Seelig asked Kafka for
some new stories, Franz felt that he had nothing worth submitting and instead sent three texts by Weiss, whose praises he sang, along with a list of the books written by this “difficult but extremely talented author.”

Kafka likes Ernst. He examines him, standing there so solidly, and says to himself that “this man stays in good health, in very good health, only by an act of will. If he wanted, he could be as sickly as anyone.”

Franz Werfel shows up one day in the early afternoon, a manuscript under his arm. Small, chubby, blond with blue eyes, he projects the confidence of a genius whose place in the firmament is assured. Dora, who is happy to meet him, greets him at the door. Kafka and Werfel shut themselves in the office. After a very long time, Werfel emerges. He is in tears and rushes off without a word of good-bye. Kafka is just as upset. He murmurs, “How can a person write so badly, so very badly …”

Werfel was expecting a shower of praise but met only with dismayed silence.

When he is obliged to judge a text, Kafka is incapable of uttering even the whitest lie, whatever the cost.

I
n early January the temperature drops to five degrees Fahrenheit. Franz becomes ill. High fever, shivering,
exhausting fits of coughing morning and night, darken his mood.

He resigns himself to calling the doctor despite his terror of the doctor’s fee, a sum that hovers in fiery figures above his bed. Before long, he is also having trouble with his digestion. He now keeps to his bed permanently.

When Max returns a second time to see him, he is horrified at the rapid decline in his friend’s health and the stark deprivation in which he lives. Once back in Prague, he contacts Franz’s uncle, Dr. Siegfried Löwy, a country doctor who practices in the Moravian town of Triesch. A bachelor with a special fondness for his young relative (Franz spent many of his vacations with him), he rushes off to visit his nephew on February 29 and persuades him to leave Berlin as soon as practicable.

“If you stay here, in such poorly heated rooms, so poorly fed, you’ll never last the winter.”

On March 14, 1924, Max is once again in Berlin. He is attending the premiere of
Jenůfa
, Janáček’s opera, whose libretto he translated. Three days later, he brings Kafka back to Prague. Franz categorically refuses to let Dora accompany him. He wants at all costs to spare her his father’s sarcasms, his contempt, his disrespect.

At the station, her face a blur of tears, the young woman clings to him, saying, “I don’t want to leave you.”

“You’ll be joining me in a few days, as soon as my uncle has found a place for me in a sanatorium.”

He kisses her again and again: “I have never wanted to live as much as I do now. With you.”

H
e steps over the threshold of his parents’ apartment. He looks like a recidivist being returned to a cell from which he will not emerge alive. He thinks he hears his jailer snicker behind his back: “The return of the prodigal son! The triumphal entry! Broke, and he hasn’t got the strength to drag himself into bed! A total disaster! I warned you about what would happen. Once again, Herr Son has done exactly as he pleased, and this is what has come of it. When there are broken pots, I’m the one to pay for them.”

He would prefer not to see even his mother, who timidly offers him chicken broth, pudding, and kefir with raspberry sauce. He hates to see her back bent in servitude. Only Marie Werner, the Fräulein, who is reserved, fair-minded, and silent, calms the rage in his heart a little.

As a rampart against his parents he asks Max, in a clipped, authoritarian tone he has never used before—the time is past for amiability—to visit him every day: “Come back tomorrow at the same time,” he says at each visit.

Cloistered in his room, his eyes shut, he broods over his failure or, sick with grief, reviews the many faces of Dora, her gestures, her words of love. He feeds on these images. Waves of nostalgia constantly carry him back to Berlin, to his six months of freedom far from the supervision of his parents.

For the first time in his life, he had lived day after day with a woman. He opened his eyes, Dora was nearby, he closed his eyes, Dora was nearby, they lived in the same house, elbow to elbow, at the same table, they slept in the same bed, cupped against each other, he had never known such joy. He murmured in her ear: I am in the arms of an angel.

When he wrote, sinking his teeth into his desk like a dog with a bone, as he put it, showing her his fangs to make her laugh, Dora would nap in her chair in front of him, because he needed her to be present. Whereas he had never written a word in front of Ottla, Felice, Milena, or Max.

“You become someone else when you write,” Dora had said.

Sometimes, she had been afraid to look at his tensed face. Your features harden, your eyes are stern, cruel, painful, I don’t know how to say it … as though you
were hunting ghosts … Is it a knife, a weapon, in your hand?

He had read her passages from “The Burrow,” on a night when he finished a chapter all in one sitting: “I live in peace in the most secret depths of my burrow, yet somewhere the enemy is tunneling a hole that will lead him straight to me. I don’t mean he has a better nose than I do, but there are relentless plunderers who rummage blindly … and I have so many enemies! I wouldn’t want, while I was scratching at the earth in despair and fury, to feel the teeth of a pursuer sinking into my thigh.”

He had raised his head.

Dora was looking at him, perplexed.

“You don’t have any enemies, no one wants to harm you, my love.”

He burst into laughter: “My sweet, dear girl, they’re only words. Come, you’re not going to take this scribbling seriously!”

Together in the preceding days they had burned page after page of his manuscripts to raise the temperature in their haybox. Was it three hundred pages, or maybe five hundred? Several times Dora had stopped him: “These manuscripts cost you so much work, over so many nights, why do you want to throw them in the fire?”

He remembers having thought of Kleist at that moment.

“Seeing the flames devour my manuscripts soothes me. The more I burn, the more I am freed of my demons, I slip between their fingers. I asked dear Max, very solemnly, as I am quite capable of doing, no? I ordered him to burn—in their entirety and without reading them—my notebooks, copybooks, manuscripts, and all my letters. I know he’ll respect my wish.”

O
n the third day after his return to Prague, there are disturbing signs: he has a monstrously sore throat. Burning sensations at the limit of what is bearable. His voice has changed, it is low and hoarse. So fast! he says.

Preserves, fruit, fruit juice, water, fruit juice, water, fruit juice, fruit, preserves, water, fruit juice, fruit, preserves, water, lemonade, cider, fruit, water. He can swallow nothing else. Only in small quantities.

His uncle, Dr. Siegfried Löwy, prescribes long and painful tests, to which the patient submits with a heavy heart. Franz can learn nothing specific about his condition. From the moment tuberculosis of the larynx is mentioned, the doctors speak in a cautious, stilted manner.
“A swelling, an infiltration, nothing alarming, we still don’t know anything for certain,” this is what he is being told, even as he is experiencing violent pain. He weighs 108 pounds in his winter clothes.

He coughs for hours morning and night. He fills his spittoon in a minute.

“A feat worthy of the Nobel Prize, wouldn’t you say?” he says to Robert Klopstock, who has just come into his room.
²⁹

Franz met this medical student at the sanatorium in Matliary two years earlier and has been writing him without interruption since. Robert sometimes irritates him to the point of anger. The young man, who resumed his studies after the stay in Matliary, complains about everything, is forever making reproaches, and is always defeatist. True, he lives in poverty.

Franz has sent him money, arranged for his meals at the university dining hall, found him temporary posts. He has recommended him to Max, to Ottla, to his friends, he starts to worry when he has no news from him, gives
him advice when he can, but “pieces of good advice,” he writes Robert, “are hung between the stars, which explains why there is so much darkness.”

Robert, who is as passionate about literature as about medicine, has been keen to translate a novel by Max Brod and several of Kafka’s stories into Hungarian, his native tongue, and Kafka has agreed to oversee the work. He’s such an appealing young man!

In the tones of a five-star general, Robert answers: “The only feat that deserves the Nobel Prize is for you to fight and get well. You still can!”

“You forget that I’m a bad soldier, no one would take me. Twice I tried to enlist, in June 1915 and June 1916. Twice the medical board declared me unfit.”

They talk about Matliary, about the inmates. Kafka thinks of his neighbor who played with the sun and mirrors like a suicide playing Russian roulette. The image of this tortured man, his mouth wide open on his ulcers and giving off a pestilential odor, still makes him nauseous.

“Will I be subjected to the same tortures?” he asks himself. “It’s one thing to write, one’s feet in slippers, ‘Torture is very important to me, my sole occupation is to experience and inflict it,’ and another to be tied to the stake. With flames licking one’s feet.

“Don’t you find it odd, Robert, that the god of pain was not the principal god of the early religions?”

As his friend is getting ready to leave, he grabs his hand: “Do you remember the promise you made me at the sanatorium? I insist that you renew it. Right away.”

Three weeks confined to his room.

Sprawled on his sofa and looking out his open window, he sees roofers at the top of the steeple on the Russian church. They are climbing, working, singing in the wind and rain. He watches them, astonished: “What are they but prehistoric giants?”

He is no longer opposed to the sanatorium since, as he says to his uncle, “I can’t oppose the fever, one hundred degrees has become my daily bread.”

He is relieved to leave his parents’ apartment and Prague. “One’s native city,” as he confided to a young friend, “is always inhospitable, a place of memories, of melancholy, of pettiness, of shame, of temptation, a place where one’s resources were put to poor use.”

At the sanatorium, Dora will be able to join him. Together, things will be easier.

“Let’s go,” he says, “the world belongs to me.
Very well
.”

D
ora arrives at Wiener Wald a few hours after Franz. It is a university sanatorium, wonderfully situated, plush, oppressive.

She walks into the ward through the rows of beds, the patients with their livid complexions and hollow cheeks coughing and spitting in funereal chorus. She is looking for her Franz. She doesn’t hear him calling, his voice is only a murmur. She sees him, almost faints. Gaunt face, eyes burning with fever, hands of a bird, which she kisses frantically to hide her distress.

She keeps repeating, “I’ll never leave you again, dear love, I’ll never leave you.”

She hears him whisper in her ear, “I’m the one who will be leaving you.”

Despite insistent requests from Franz Werfel and repeated entreaties from Max, the director, Professor Hajek, refuses to assign Herr Kafka a private room: “All I can see in him is the patient in bed 18.”

For the fever he prescribes liquid pyramidon three times a day; for the coughing, demopon, which is ineffective, and atropine. Franz is given hard candies with analgesics, and his throat is sprayed with mentholated oil. His larynx is so swollen that when he swallows, Franz feels as if shards of glass are embedded in his throat. He can no longer eat.

Pointing to his throat, he asks the nurse, “What does it look like in there?”

She answers frankly, “A witch’s cauldron.”

Despite treatment, the fever never drops below 101 degrees. Professor Hajek confirms the diagnosis: tuberculosis of the larynx. And of the epiglottis.

The lungs are in such poor condition that Hajek soon refuses to keep the patient on, saying that he is beyond the help of any specialist.

“The only palliatives,” he says before turning away, “would be morphine and pantopon.”

The care is so hideously expensive that—for the first time—Franz asks Max to offer his most recent stories to a publisher
right away
(he double-underlines the words). “ ‘Josephine’ will have to rescue me,” he writes, “there is nothing else for it.”